Cry of the Hawk

“Just leave his body here? Not bury him with military honors?”

“He’s already been honored by whoever killed him, General,” Shad explained. “Just let his body be … for the wind and the birds of prey … and the winters yet to come visit this sacred place.”

Jonah hadn’t seen such savagery in longer than he could remember—if ever.

Two of the white soldiers with Lieutenant Lyman S. Kidder’s doomed patrol had evidently been alive enough when the warriors reached them; then they had been tortured to death. Two small fires over which to exact some excruciatingly delicious agony on their prisoners while death lingered, hovering closer and closer.

Every nose hacked off. Faces hammered into pulp. Tongues severed at the root. Shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles all with sinews and tendons severed. Flopping loose as a wood marionette when the burial detail hauled the bodies over to each shallow grave. Other soldiers were assigned to bring along the severed limbs.

Naked, white, puffy bodies were lowered into the shallow, yawning holes and quickly covered up by the grunting, puking burial detail, each man sweating through it, some collapsing. The officer in charge had to order another man up to complete what the others could not. Few made it through without losing what they had left in their bellies from breakfast many hours before.

Each body pierced with so many arrows had reminded Jonah of the soft velvet pincushion his mother had used almost daily back in the Shenandoah, down in the shadow of Big Cobbler while he was growing into a man. Before he moved to Missouri. Before he marched off to war behind General Sterling Price. And ended up never seeing his family again.

He squeezed the thought from his mind—the way he wrung his socks out once they reached Fort Wallace. Hard, even savagely—he forced the thought from his mind every time it came to haunt him with not knowing. Trying again to concentrate on that image of his mother’s pincushion—so he would not have to remember the image of those twelve bodies, each bristling with no less than forty, perhaps fifty shafts, silently rustled by the omnipresent prairie wind.

It was something he was coming to think on less and less now. Only out here on the plains was the wind always blowing. Not like this back where he was born, nor in that Missouri valley where the curtains still hung, motionless in the broken windows like the eye sockets on buffalo skulls. Out here, the wind always blew.

It cleansed the land and the air that moved over it. Without stop, he figured. Nothing lasted for long out here. But then, everything stayed the same forever here too. Funny, but to his way of thinking right now as he sat in a little patch of shade beside the limestone walls of Fort Wallace, Kansas Territory, that fit in some type of symmetry.

Nothing lasted long out here. Yet everything stayed the same forever.

Victory … or death. He thought often on that now. Seeing that the doomed dozen had been given little choice but to die with as much honor as each of them could muster. Dying was lonely, even with others around you. No man do it for you. It came down to it, Jonah had seen enough of the dying already. Came close a couple times himself. The coldest he had ever been. Wondering at the time if he’d ever be warm again.

And here he sat, sweating in this piece of shade as the sun settled. A Monday he was told by Wheeler, the contract post commissary agent, 15 July.

Custer strode out of the post commander’s office into the easing of the sun minutes later, yanking on his sweat-stained deerskin gloves. He tugged down the big, cream-colored, broad-brimmed hat and adjusted the blood red tie at his Adam’s apple, letting the breeze nudge it over his shoulder among the strawberry curls.

He was a sight, Jonah had to admit. The man who had cut a swath through one Confederate horse outfit after another. Twelve mounts shot out from under him. The Yankee who whipped J.E.B. Stuart at Gettysburg back to sixty-three. And the one who bottled up the old man himself, Robert E., in the wood down to Appomattox near McLean’s new farmhouse.

Custer.

By God, the man was pulling out from this run-down motley collection of limestone buildings and adobe dugouts with an escort of four officers and seventy-two troopers, leaving the rest behind with Major Elliott and what soldiers the Seventh’s own Captain Frederick W. Benteen already commanded here at Wallace. Custer was hurrying east as fast as those with him could follow.

Upon arriving here yesterday, the lieutenant colonel had greedily read dispatches wired from Fort Harker far to the east along the Smoky Hill, learning of the terrible flood that had required Harker to be abandoned. Word had it cholera was ravaging the forts of central Kansas. No other news had been received at Fort Wallace. Nothing from Sherman nor Sheridan. No letters from his beloved wife either.